Rare. With the interesting title, The Crystals and the Plants, a reader might expect to find as much on botany as crystallography, but that is not the case. Here, Scharff makes interesting comparisons between the formation of plants and crystals. Attempting to explain how regular crystal forms come into existence, he shows in some degree that crystals "grow" like plants by the accretion of atoms to the crystalline structure. Explaining that crystals form, like plants, along predefined directions, he explains that in the case of crystals, these directions are along axial directions and that it is around the axis of the crystal that the mineral accumulates. The book describes crystals, crystal structures, atoms, crystal axes, diamorphism, properties, etc.